Compared to traditional open surgery, minimally invasive surgical procedures reduce patient trauma and recovery time, yet the dexterity of the surgeon is reduced due to the small incisions, long instruments, and limited indirect visibility of the operative site inside the patient. Robotic surgical systems, teleoperated by surgeons from a master control console with joystick-type manipulation interfaces, have been commercially developed yet their adoption into standard practice has been limited due to size, complexity, cost, and time-consuming setup, maintenance, and sterilization procedures. The goal of our research is to improve the effectiveness of robot-assisted surgery by developing much smaller, simpler robotic manipulators for surgery. The specific aims of our work are 1) to develop a complete functional robotic surgical system prototype which is portable, sterilizeable, can be fixed to the rails of an operating table, and requires no initialization procedures before use, 2) to quantify and optimize the operation of the system in terms of accuracy, dynamic response, setup time, ease of use, and reliability using time, force, and position data from trajectory following experiments with both our prototype system and a commercial robotic surgery arm for comparison, and 3) to evaluate and improve the performance of the prototype system when used in realistic simulated surgical procedures and environments, by comparing the accuracy and task completion times of surgeons in training performing typical surgical tasks with and without the teleoperated system. Existing teleoperation interfaces will be used in the master console, endoscope and instrument manipulators prototypes have been developed, and new articulated surgical instruments will be developed during this project. The parameters of the prototype and a commercial surgical robot arm will be tested and compared. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]